One of the great things about the move to music downloads is that music on the go has really become much more practical. iPods and other such devices (I can’t think of anything other than iPods but I’m sure that they must exist) mean that you can carry around with you so much more than when having a Walkman meant carrying tapes and swapping them around. However, my music collection is too large even for an iPod Classic so being able to stream my music from a hosted server with a large capacity hard drive is ideal. I could have … Read the rest
Google Chrome on iOS
So my favourite browser has finally made it on to my favourite mobile operating system as last night Google Chrome for iOS was released.
I have downloaded it onto both my iPad and iPhone and I’ve been immediately impressed with just how much it looks like its desktop siblings, which shouldn’t be a great surprise, especially on the iPad.
There are a number of great things that have been brought over from the dekstop versions including the omnibar that allows you to enter either a web address or a search term and Chrome is intelligent enough to work out what … Read the rest
Coding on the web
I ceased to be a professional developer a number of years ago but I have still continued to dabble either when things needed doing at work or for my own amusement. I started out working on COBOL projects and the obscure FOCUS before I retrained to the wonderful PowerBuilder. Nowadays it is almost predominately PHP and a little bit of mobile development with Rhodes. I have never really been one for dedicated IDEs preferring to use a rich text editor such as Notepad++ on Windows and TextWrangler on Mac.
Recently I have been working across a number of … Read the rest
Apple Branded USB Stick
I recently wiped my MacBook Air and restored it to factory settings, a process that was necessary but added a few grey hairs to my head.
Delivered with my MacBook Air was a neat little USB stick that contained a recovery image for Snow Leopard, however, this was superseded with the introduction of Lion that creates a recovery partition on the hard drive itself. So I did the restore entirely from this recovery partition, at least that was the theory, something and I am still not clear what, went awry in the process and Internet Recovery kicked in. This simply … Read the rest
WordPress 3.4
So the latest version of the WordPress blogging and CMS platform, on which this and so many other sites are based, has been released. Version 3.4 brings a number of new improvements such as the really neat Twitter integration you can see below. To get this to work you simply need to cut and paste the tweet URL into the editor and you are good to go. So to get the block displayed all I had to do was include the following:
https://twitter.com/spokenlikeageek/status/213251531871490048
I have been playing about with WordPress more and more since the hacking incident, mainly to … Read the rest
The Fascinating World of Top Level Domains
Yesterday was another big day for the Internet when details of who had applied for what ” gerneric top level domains” (gTLD). A top level domain is the bit that comes after the final period in a domain name, so .com, .co.uk.org etc. A process was begun a while back to open out the allocation of gTLDs and allowing anyone to apply for a gTLD so I could apply for .neil, for example. In practice only those with deep pockets could apply and it is fascinating to see who has.
Ignoring that this could be incredibly confusing for users the … Read the rest
Three Offers up Cheap(er) Mobile Roaming
Here’s a welcome bit of news just two days before I go off on a weekend break to Denmark – UK mobile provider three are introducing an all-you-can-eat mobile roaming tariff of “only” £5 per day. Called the Euro Internet Pass it allows monthly contract customers to access the web on the go.
One of the real frustrations of travelling abroad in the past has been that if you wanted to use the maps app on your phone to find out exactly where you were and where the restaurant was that you were making for it could have cost you … Read the rest
Who’s Stolen my Cursor?
I started to notice yesterday that when on Google Chrome after a couple of second of inactivity the cursor would disappear. A quick search shows that people have been reporting this issue as far back as 2009.
Further investigation seems to show that the issue is caused by having certain websites open (including this one). Others have suggested that the culprit is the Flash plug-in, although I am not convinced of that.
Has anyone else had this issue? Do you see the problem when Spoken Like a Geek is open? I would be interested to know so leave us a … Read the rest
If This, Then That
Sometimes the Internet throws up a really simple but great idea that makes life much easier. If this, then that or ifttt to be more accurate, is one such idea.
ifttt allows you to create tasks where an action is carried out on some event. So, for example, when an email is received from a certain email address a copy is then forwarded automatically to another account, or when the Guardian tweets that the latest Long Good Read is available the text is sent to Instapaper. These are two examples but given the long list of services that ifttt … Read the rest
The One Thing I Want From iOS 6
So Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference begins on Monday and as ever the blogsphere is all aglow with just exactly what will be announced. So far this seems to include a refresh of every MacBook and iMac model, iOS 6 and, of course, the long awaited TV which just has to be called iTV. Most of that leaves me cold for now but given I have both an iPhone and an iPad any improvements that are made to the operating system are going to have a pretty direct impact on me.
Lots of other blogs have been drawing up long … Read the rest